Email Marketing

We’ve talked about how email marketing is still around us, alive and well. We’ve also introduced the newest trends that will shape this industry. Now let’s move on and review the top 5 tips on how to succeed with your email marketing campaigns.

Frequency and scheduling

There’s no one-rule-fits-all here, but you have to determine the rate of your email marketing campaign. Overall you need to decide on daily, weekly or monthly frequencies. It is also important to schedule your emails for your audience. Make a decision based on your business or get help from an outside expert and plan your emails for maximum impact.

Tailor your content to your audience

Content is everything, but not everyone on your list is interested in the same content. Tailor your content to your audience, or ever better, tailor it to become a 1-on-1 communication master tool. Personalize your content for every subscriber and their activity. Start by welcoming new subscribers and introducing them to your platform. Engage differently with subscribers who enlisted in the last 1-2 weeks. Treat your buyers separately from others. This leads to our 3rd tip: segmentation.

Segment your audience

There’s one mass of subscribers, but there’s not just one list. Create multiple lists of subscribers. Use time as a factor first, segment the audience into new subscribers and early comers. Track their activity and segment them into early birds, buyers and the rest. Every client is different even though you have one tribe.

Track everything

There are 3rd party tools for email marketing, and most of the newsletter services have useful tracking options. Use these tools to track all that’s happening in the mailbox with your newsletters. Also, track everything that happens with links clicked outside the emails. Once you harnessed all the information and insights you can get from emails, you’ll be surprised how much it tells you about your customers. You can turn this data into further segments and tailor your content to your audiences.

Respect privacy but do whatever you can do to grow

We mentioned that email is the most personal marketing tool as it connects individual mailboxes with brands. Respect that privacy. It’s not just about spamming but also don’t deliver promotions where there are no listeners. But in the meantime do everything possible to grow your list. Implement popups and options where users can signup to your newsletter easily. Once users clicked ‘sign up’ you’ll have access to their most important online space: their mailbox. It’s the best long-term communication platform you can get. Respect it and grow it.

This week we will show you the newest trends in email marketing and how to harness the power of emails in your marketing efforts. Please join our weekly Q&A on email marketing where we answer all of your questions.

Email marketing has always been here and seems it will always be. Neither social media nor the new tools of growth hacking could kill it, and it still overperforms on engagement and open rates like nothing else. More so, email marketing has grown up with the technologies around it, and now it walks hand in hand with e-commerce and mobile marketing. Here are the top 5 trends in email marketing.

Optimize for mobile

Reading an email remains the number one activity on smartphones. It is clear that every email marketing campaign has to be optimized for mobile with responsive design. There is nothing more valuable to a company than a 1-on-1 channel to a consumer with a well-targeted message in their pocket.

Targeting will be more precise

Targeting in email marketing is a bit different than in social media ads or content. But the baseline doesn’t change: people look for personalized experiences. Email automation software will evolve to a point where companies can customize and manage millions of subscribers, sending out highly-personalized emails based on their behavior.

No more HTML coding

You’ve probably seen the new era of websites, like SquareSpace and some elements of WordPress where you don’t need to do any coding to get a great website. Well, that will finally reach email as well: no more newsletter template coding. All new templates will arise, and the new templates will have all the options that any marketer needs, it’s just a matter of drag-and-drop.

The new era of interactive emails

The one single disadvantage that email had against social media was the lack of interactivity. Now this will change with interactive email template designs. Sometimes it’s referred to as kinetic email. The new templates can offer interactive, clickable brand experiences in users’ inboxes. Animation will also play an essential part in the visuals which will drive the engagement of brands further.

Automation will kick-boost email marketing

When marketing and automation work together, magic happens. Currently, tons of triggers can force automation tools to send out personalized mail campaigns. This trend will continue to rise as new algorithms are implemented and growth hacking will be the norm of marketing.

If the thought of exploring how the power of email leveraging your company’s marketing objectives fills you with excitement, don’t miss our weekly Q&A. Are you ready to jump-start the conversation?

Remember the times when memes – not yet having this name at that point – were shared through email chains in the office? Oh yes, at those times we had the highest email open rates. Gary Vaynerchuk once said that his wine store’s marketing emails had an above 90% open rate. That was back in the 90s, now 9% is considered a success. Email is still very much alive and is still a kickass and effective marketing tool. So what happened? Let’s find out in this article.

Email still has an average open rate of 20% and 2-3% click-through rate

When social media marketing emerged few years ago – and remember that it is still in its baby shoes – every marketing professional dug a grave for email marketing. And not just for marketing but also for email. Remember Google Wave for example, which was created to substitute the email as a communication tool in the name of social media? Email was considered ‘uncool’ and ‘old-fashioned.’ We witnessed 70-90% open rates for email marketing campaigns in the 90s and 2000s and with the introduction of social media it declined to 30% and 20%. But it stopped there. Just to put into perspective: an average Facebook page delivers its content and posts only for the 5-10% of their audience and only has a 1% or less engagement rate. So 20% open rate (visibility) and 2-3% CTR (engagement) are still considered a fail? We don’t think so.

Email is personal and not a channel

There are very strict policies against spamming. People’s mailboxes are still considered as a private sphere of their lives so invading them is still an offense. This is not the case with a spammy promotion-based Facebook page or Twitter feed. When people sign up for a newsletter, it showcases an interest which is a far stronger bond than hitting a small like on a page or a follow button. These subscribers let that brand into their private lives. The still high 20-30% open rates are the consequences.

Email is also not a channel like a Facebook page. There’s no conversation in a newsletter. Only content delivered to a user based on their personal interests and expectations. Anyone who treats newsletters as a channel will ultimately fail, so instead of using a conversation platform adapt to the context and deliver messages to an already interested group.

Email is one of the best platforms for measuring engagement

Everyone knows that if something cannot be measured – it does not exist. There are plenty of options to measure your site’s performance or the delivery of your social media ads, but email will always be different. It is over-personalized and can be measured individually so the email marketing manager will know what each user does and how they engage with the newsletter’s content. This gives a cutting edge advantage over other platforms.

This week we will show you the newest trends in email marketing and how to harness the power of emails in your marketing efforts. Please join our weekly Q&A on email marketing where we answer all of your questions.